


fore-edge painting

by vash (hanamichi)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Auror Harry Potter, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Gratuitously Hot Voldemort, Harry Potter is a Horcrux, M/M, Memory Alteration, Muggle London, No Bashing, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pining, Post-Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:48:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21636133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hanamichi/pseuds/vash
Summary: “I rock between dark and dark, / My soul nearly my own, / My dead selves singing.”In which Harry and Hermione, with the Ministry's blessing, erase Voldemort's memory in an attempt to both fix and punish him, and send him to live as a muggle. Harry tries to stay away. He fails.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 25
Kudos: 104





	fore-edge painting

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this fic because I wanted Tom and Harry to have cute dates. Since Tom is too much of an asshole I had to erase his memories in order to get that. It was supposed to be fluffy but it got a little angsty as I wrote it. It was supposed to be short but now I have a whole multi-chapter thing planned. It's fun writing Tom interacting with muggle things. This is a slowish-burn (at least by my standards) so no explicit content for a while. 
> 
> (also, to everyone asking about the omegaverse fics: I thank you for your interest but I won't upload them again, sorry :x but I do want to write more omegaverse Tom/Harry)

He shouldn’t be here.

The sun too weak to break through the cold gives London only light. Harry stands, in the self-appointed and illegal task, on that street. Bundled in a heavy coat and a Weasley’s Christmas jumper underneath it, waiting in guilt and impatience and cold. Around him Westminster carries on with indifference, unaware of who it harbours, the one Harry is here to see for the first time in a year. Muggles walk and talk in that same ignorance. Crazy it is, now that he thinks about it looking at the Londoners, at the tourists staring at maps and taking photos, at all those innocents, that they are letting Voldemort wander among them freely. Muzzled, sure, but still a shark in shallow waters.

But a whole year has passed and no blood has been spilled. No red-soaked foam. The muzzle held on.

It’s wrong. But a headstrong child grew into a headstrong adult and curiosity alone drove him first this day, to this place, to this street. Not hate or its opposing turmoil (pity? Mercy?), not even the foreign soul that lives alongside his own, but the curiosity of a scientist, a researcher, the feeling Harry associates with Hermione. That yearn for truths he’s had since he was a child. Perhaps a bit of the old disobedience, too. He’s always had a tendency, not extinguished now in his Auror days, of hearing a challenge whenever someone says _you can’t._

And then he sees him.

That handsome face that’s haunted him since he was fourteen. But grey-eyed now instead of red and in muggle garb, not shimmering dark silk. There’s even a healthy colour to his cheeks. He’s a long way from the pale vampire that slid from the cauldron naked and striking and deadly, like God’s most monstrous Adam.

And though Voldemort is expected, there is still shock to be felt. A slight gasp. Like the sight of a long-lost lover. 

The vision is strange: Tom, six feet two of a once-was Dard Lord exciting the building Harry has been watching for the last forty minutes, halting, holding open the door to an older muggle woman, smiling at her as she thanks him and then looking down at his iphone, fingers moving with the same dexterity over the screen as they used to hold a wand. Looking both ways before crossing the street on a noisy little corner of London. Beautiful and busy and perhaps not noticing the many heads turning to him as he walks. Wearing a long black coat over his suit like an unconscious sigil of his lordly days. 

Or maybe he’s just cold.

Harry follows him.

Wand tucked in the back pocket of his jeans, under his shirt. He watches Tom bring the phone to his ear and tries to read the words on his lips. Common phrases. No wisp of Latin, nothing to call home the snakes. His hand opens and closes at his side, as he considers breaking the rules for the millionth time in his life. But he doesn’t have a good reason for this now, not like in the old, rebel days. This is just a heart’s whim.

 _But am I not responsible for him now, in a way?_ He reasons with himself. _I just want to check how he’s doing. See if he’s as harmless as he looks. There’s evil he could do even without a wand. Even without magic._

Not entirely convinced, but having enough moral leeway to go with it, Harry whispers the _accio_ , pockets its result and keeps walking. Waiting for the justification for being here, clenched-fisted and narrowing his eyes, a strange anticipation inside him. But what does he expect Voldemort to do? Suddenly push a muggle to the incoming traffic? Break the window of a shop? All he does is walk, apparently with a destination in mind, and check his phone from time to time. Heedless of all muggles around him, heedless of the hate he’s forgotten.

This goes on for three more blocks as Harry tells himself feverishly:

_This is fucking stupid and you should go back now. Just slip into an alley and Disapparate already, no one will see—_

But on that moment,

(as if he sensed it)

Tom turns and asks:

“Why are you following me?”

In his baritone, a whiff of that same distrust he had used with Dumbledore when he was a child. A memory Harry knows by heart. Woven into his mind like his own. _I’ve mapped the cities of your life, Tom. I’ve laid waste to them and I’ve built others in their stead._

“You, uh, dropped your wallet.”

Tom’s eyebrows rise and he pats the pockets of his coat in a gesture immensely, painfully normal.

“And you waited this long to tell me?” Tom says, a little annoyed, but moves to take the wallet from Harry’s hand.

“You’re welcome.” Harry points out. In suspension. Examining Tom as he discreetly counts the pounds, feeling almost the voyeur for not being recognised. Almost criminal, for all that he knows and Tom knows not.

“Thank you,” Tom concedes. He looks at Harry more intently now, something settling in his grey eyes as he takes him in. A smile begins to unravel on his mouth, a smile that teases the possibility of a smirk. A man caught off guard but bouncing back very fast. “You expecting a reward, kid?”

“What? No.” Harry defends himself, surprised. It occurs to him that he hasn’t plan this very well. This exchange won’t get him very far – there was only so much he can say to a stranger on the street. But Tom solves that problem for him with his next words.

“Maybe you should, upstanding citizen that you are.”

In any other tongue it would be mockery, Harry thinks, but Tom makes them light, threw the phrase to the other end of the spectrum, one that edges on flirtation. In his bewilderment Harry doesn’t fully realise that.

“I’m in my lunch break, actually. There’s a nice restaurant nearby. Let me treat you.”

Shocked, struck-still, Harry can’t quite make his mouth move. He made a mistake, he thinks, he definitely made a mistake, and yet—

 _Let me,_ he had said, and though something in him invited no refusal, Harry appreciated the wording. A request, not a demand. Not something he would do as Lord Voldemort. But as Tom, as nine-to-five Tom, as the Tom who shops at Tesco and Sainsbury’s and drinks beer on weekends…

“I shouldn’t—” and he really shouldn’t, not just out of politeness. He has already crossed a professional line there by _making contact._ If he leaves now, however, Tom will eventually forget the meeting. Just a boy that day, who gave him back his wallet. A face that will fade within the week. But if Harry accepts the invitation the memory will hold on longer.

“I’m Tom Riddle,” the once-was Dark Lord introduces himself, interrupting Harry’s thoughts, offering his hand, leaving it waiting in the air.

_Would he know me by touch?_

Harry thinks, the idea like a revived corpse clawing its way out of a grave,

_Would my blood call out to his?_

After hesitating, Harry lets his hand meet Voldemort’s. So small within his. Those pianist’s fingers reach all the way to his wrist and touch the thinnest part of his skin. Beneath, his veins. Nothing happens. They look at each other and Tom’s smiling like his eyes have always only been grey.

“What do I call you?” he asks.

“James,” Harry answers automatically. Not a complete lie. As he says it, as he puts effort on it, he feels himself already agreeing to the invitation. Giving up his name, even one borrowed, gives Tom power, as the old fairy tales went. “Evans. James Evans.”

“And do you like Japanese food, James Evans?”

Behind them a man is folding the buckwheat like pages of a book and cutting it, fashioning its mass into strings. A second one boils the dough. Another one is responsible for the toppings. The kitchen-work, exposed to the costumers through a glass wall, is one of the restaurant’s charms besides the high ceiling, the clean, minimalistic design of the tables and chairs, and the food itself. But Harry’s eyes go only as far as Tom or the menu on his hands. Tom assesses him intently, a softer, mirrored version of the gaze Harry first encountered when he was twelve, in the chamber of secrets.

“I’m not a kid, you know.” Harry says finally, after a waitress had come to take their orders ( _“Mori for me, Hanamaki for him,”_ Tom told her _“and the assorted tempura too. Thank you.”_ ) “I’m twenty-four.” 

“Twenty-four is still a kid to me.”

“How old are _you_?” Harry asks, although he knows. Both the real answer, the real years, and the age Tom believes he is.

“Old enough to be your father.” Tom replies lightly, though there is no grey in his hair, and the lining is scarce in his face. And yet something in his eyes gives him away. In the drawl of his words, the way he carries himself, with the unhurried prowl of an older lion. “Are you at uni?”

“I work. I’m, uh, with the police.”

“You don’t look like police.”

“I’m…a special agent.”

“Are you mi6?”

“Sort of.” Harry offers.

“Should you be telling me this?” Tom asks, looking very unconvinced.

“It’s not CIA,” Harry argues, pulling words from the life he had stopped living more than a decade ago. The irony of it all, to be reacquainted with mugglehood because of _Voldemort_. “It’s not America.”

Tom’s mouth tilts.

Their food arrives. Harry tries to remember the single time he went to a Japanese restaurant with Hermione, but while the quality of the food has stayed with him, the correct way to hold the hashi has not. Voldemort does it with the ease of a native. Of all his years of travel, perhaps some has been spent on Japan. Perhaps not, and this is something he’s picked up this last year.

“Here,” Tom reaches across the table and holds Harry’s hand like a child’s, curling his fingers around the chopsticks in the correct position. “See? Almost like tweezers.”

Then he moves back. Harry’s skin seared where he touched it. With such ease and intimacy as if some of him remembers that Harry has been his for twenty-three years and will remain so forever.

Harry looks down at his hanamaki soba. Stream rising from the bowl. It looks very good. He asks:

“What about you, what do you do?”

“Oh, mine’s boring.” Tom’s soba is cold. He eats a mouthful, nods to himself, and then continues: “I work at a non-profit. Mostly I convince rich people to give me money to save the planet.” He grins. “So, do you catch bad guys? Evil Russian spies?”

That teasing again and laden so heavily with flirtation that Harry can’t ignore it this time and is annoyed by it, instead. By Tom and by the blush on his own cheeks. Annoyed more when Tom notices and smiles as if he’d got the result he wanted.

“I caught a _very_ bad guy once.” Harry bites out. “He wasn’t Russian, but he was what people would call evil.”

“What did he do?”

“He killed people.” Harry answers. “Too many to count.”

“A serial killer?”

“More like a war criminal.”

Something in his voice carries a death-gravity, something of that day in which he held a knife to his own throat and taunted Tom with mortality. And Voldemort knew, that victory day, that Harry would follow through with it, born a sacrifice as he was, kissing death’s cheek since he was one. Tom, as he is now, looks at him with eyes grey as clear as autumn skies, and believes him. Half-awed too, as if he isn’t intimate with killing. As if he isn’t the very bad, bad man Harry had caught.

Harry looks away.

“I didn’t catch him alone. It was a team effort. I just helped.”

“Still,” Tom says, his voice soft like he is calming down a spooked animal. “Very impressive for someone so young.”

Tom doesn’t press him for details and for that, Harry is glad. That shred of soul still in Tom, Harry’s tiniest sibling, is it enough to keep him human? Is it empathy, now, what makes Tom wait in silence until Harry’s heart stops beating so hard, until the faint wetness in his eyes dries up entirely? Or is it just shallow charm? Just the mockery of emotion?

Maybe he is wrong to have met him. Hermione had told him so: _you’re emotionally invested, which means you’re emotionally compromised._ But what wizard wouldn’t be, when it came to Voldemort?

Still, maybe she was right. He could slip away right now, with a quick _Obliviate_. What was one more after the wrecked they have done to Voldemort’s memories?

“What a strange first date.” Tom points out.

Harry looks back at him, so casual, so _cool._ The bastard doesn’t have the decency to blush, but Harry does it for him.

“This is _not_ a date.”

“Is that so? Better luck to me next time, then.”

“Who says there will be a next time?” Harry retorts, exasperated.

“Here’s to hoping, Mi6 junior.” Tom says. “Now eat the tempura, is getting cold.”

They have wagashi for dessert, colourful little sweets that Harry has never tried before, and – ironically – lemon sorbet. Their conversation shifts to lighter topics. No more talk of death.

At the end, despite Harry’s protests, Tom foots the bill ( _“my weekly indulgence”_ he tells Harry), and gives him his card. A black square, elegant and simple, with Tom’s name in white, and his email, his cellphone number and the website for the non-profit where he works on the back, where the cardstock is white and the letters are black. T.M.Riddle, it says.

“Come see me again, Mi6 junior.” He says outside of the restaurant, and leaves before Harry can answer. One hand raised over his shoulder in farewell. Harry stays there for a while more, holding the card in his hand. Now, in the street-coldness, the last hour feels like a dream. But there is still a whiff of Tom’s cologne in the air. The faint sweetness of the wagashi lingers on.

When they began, three years after the war, Voldemort’s hair was long enough to slither from the surface where he laid, which was metal and cold. An autopsy table of wizard folk. And he wore well the stillness of a corpse, he’d tempt princes and princesses to try and kiss him alive. Pale and peaceful and tame at last. His breathing so faint, almost inexistent.

Hair grows even in death, Harry had heard someone said, but didn’t know if there was any truth to it. It would be so for Voldemort, at least. The Boy-Who-Lived touched that hair and found it soft; someone had taken the time to use a spell to keep it that way, someone had cared just enough. _Probably Hermione,_ he thought.

Harry moved him very gently though Tom would not wake up (even with harshness, even with a kiss). Perhaps they should leave him until the sleeping drought wore off, years and years from now. Leave him until his hair reached the floor and grazed it, leave him until the world had long forgotten his name. Until his soul mended with time.

Hermione came in. Maybe she knew what he was thinking. They looked at each other and then at the defeated Dark Lord.

“Let’s start.” She said after a moment, and they did.

**Author's Note:**

> kudos and comments are very appreciated. Thank you for reading!


End file.
